If you are familiar with web design and are happy building sites in html and css, taking the next step and making your designs into WordPress themes isn’t that hard but it pays to learn how to do it the correct way from the start.

In this roundup post, I have tracked down 20 high quality tutorials which will help you code your designs into WordPress themes – there were loads of outdated tutorials but the ones here are all up to date and cover the latest WordPress features – Custom Menus, Custom Post Types, Shortcodes, Theme Options Panels and Custom Widgets.

Powering Your Design With WordPress

I’ll presume here that you’re already interested in WordPress if you’re reading this but in case you’re not, why WordPress? What’s the big deal? Well, right now, about 14% of the web is built on top of WordPress. That means, as web designers, it’s important that we get this whole theming thing right.

Ultimate Guide to WordPress Menus

WordPress had been using the conceptual term ‘menu’ as a mysterious feature until version 3.0. Presenting the new customization admin options back then revealed a whole new world for developers and users to tune up their themes and easily modify the standard navigation – horizontal or vertical components. If you want to squeeze the juice out of your menus, check out that Ultimate Guide to WordPress Menus.

Developing Your First WordPress Theme

Themes are a huge part of what makes WordPress as popular as it is, and in this three-part series we’ll take you through a step-by-step process that results in a completed, functioning WordPress theme. No prior knowledge required, this is the perfect place to start if you’re completely new to WordPress.

WordPress Shortcodes: The Right Way

One of the primary reasons why WordPress is the most popular CMS platform available is the sheer level of customizability that it brings to the table. Today, we’ll review the process of integrating one of those popular features, shortcodes, in the most user friendly way possible, into our theme.

How to Code a WordPress 3.0 Theme from Scratch

With the release of WordPress 3.0 came the implementation of many new features to the popular content management system. In this tutorial we are going to show you exactly how to code a WordPress 3.0 theme from the ground up to take advantage of all of these new features, as well as create a blogging-ready, minimal theme.

How to Build a Custom WordPress Theme from Scratch

If you’re confident with your CSS and HTML, it’s not hard at all to step up to the challenge of building a custom WordPress theme. This overview shows the process of how my latest custom WordPress theme was built from design concept through to completed theme.

WordPress Theme Tutorial

In this tutorial I’ll show you how a WordPress theme comes together. I’ll walk you step by step through the html, css and WordPress PHP functions and how they work. I will use the default theme in WordPress to start out, but then will create more complicated themes as the tutorial continues.

WordPress Theme Tutorial In 14 Lessons

The tutorial is divided up in 14 lessons, each in its own post. The lessons contains logical sequential steps in the themeing process. We will write a theme from scratch, progressively developing the theme by adding support for different kind of content and features.

Basics Of WordPress Theme Design

WordPress theme development is actually very hard. In this post we’ll look at the different aspects of WordPress theme development, starting with the fundamentals and then moving swiftly onto the basics, template tags and the more advanced files.

How to Build a Basic Portfolio WordPress Theme

The theme we’re going to create is going to be made specifically for use as a portfolio website, so many of the usual features of WordPress themes will be omitted in this guide. Our website concept isn’t a blog, so this tutorial is aimed more at using WordPress as a simple CMS.

Create a Multi-Layout Portfolio with WordPress

WordPress, as a content management system, is often used for creating portfolio websites. With the evolution of user interface design and functionalities, a new trend has emerged: displaying portfolio items in different layouts. This tutorial details the process of creating a dedicated portfolio section in WordPress’ backend, and using jQuery and CSS3 to display the portfolio in a classy manner.

Creating a Simple Child Theme Using Twenty Eleven

Instead of modifying an existing theme (and risk losing the changes at the next update), we can create a child theme, which separates our changes from the parent. In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a simple child theme.

An Alternative to the Shortcode Madness

The first alternative up for debate is to provide a custom styles drop down menu. This method is simple to implement for developers and simple to use for users. This is by no means revolutionary as it has been done before, but it is certainly effective.

How to Create Simple & Universal CSS-Based Button Styles

More often than not I am finding that I try to incorporate as much of a theme design as possible using CSS rather than source images. Especially with the introduction of CSS3, designing a theme almost entirely via CSS is actually fairly easy to do, not to mention clean and efficient.

6 Essential Plugins For WordPress Theme Developers

If you create themes for WordPress, free ones to the repository, premium ones to theme marketplaces or exclusive ones for your clients, there are some techniques that you will probably use to preview, debug and profile your work.

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About WPLift

Wplift was founded in September 2010 by Oliver Dale to help people with WordPress by providing tutorials, theme roundups,
plugin guides and general WordPress news. Since then the blog has grown exponentially & now reaches hundreds of thousands of WordPress users each month.